I’ve flipped my blog from one theme to another, while keeping it within GitHub Pages. On the way, I’ve been deleting and updating cruft. But what should I do about my historical links to http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com though?

Clicking through to www.nosoftwarepatents.com leads me to believe that it’s ‘parked’ at some moment in 2007. The style’s archaic, and the logos are unusable, assuming you wanted to demonstrate affinity, and there’s no merchandise. Just in case they update or delete it, I’ll screencap it for you:

Well it turns out one of the former front-men for NoSoftwarePatents have had a change of heart. I’ll come back to this later.

Where’s the anti-software-patents movement organizing itself ?

PatentAbsurdity.com

Their site has a movie clip from 2009, and no affinity logos (etc). It also links to Reddit/Digg postings from 2010 :

In summary, I can’t help but think that a stronger position could be held with fewer manifesto items. These feel like alternates, and opponents could could use the indecision to elicit ‘no decision’ on the set of them. Where has the science of winning arguments been applied? Where’s the logos / merchandise?

There is also a problem around the “when” associated with the effort. Specifically, when should will the petition be closed, and the accumulated signatories be sent off? Also, will the EFF add all the correspondents to their mail-shot database, to solicit donations?

Russ Krajec

This guy is an IP lawyer. He recently penned a well written, if biased, piece on his site that’s quite critical of the anti-software-patents community. I’m listing this guy, because he’s up there in Google’s sear-rank for this topic.

What IS happening though?

The patent office is reviewing its policy on software patents and is asking for feedback (PDF). Groklaw reports that the USPTO will be hosting a pair of roundtable sessions in February, during which the public will have the ability to attend and put forth their viewpoints. From the article: ’It’s obvious the USPTO realizes there is serious unhappiness among software developers, and they’d like to improve things. Software developers are the folks most immediately and directly affected by the software patents the USPTO issues, and it’s getting to the point that no one can code anything without potentially getting sued. I don’t wish to be cynical, though, as that’s a useless thing. So maybe we should look at it as an opportunity to at least be heard. It’s progress that they even thought about having a dialogue with developers, if you look at it that way.’ If you can make it to Silicon Valley on February 12 or New York City on February 27, go and make your voice heard.

The same is being talked about in a number of other public and private forums, and is very topical presently. It’s a co-incidence that I’m posting this today though.

What’s really needed?

A goto, place that pulls in contributions from others globally, and provides services back. Services that relevant, considered and up to date. Also, keep the content in GitHub please so strangers can embarrass you with contributions.

Aside from the portal coordinating efforts, community leaders need to organize and trust no government groups at any stage to agree, or to do our bidding. Moreover, there’s plenty of reasons that Google and others would want to do some Money-Is-Speech to participate (and rationalize the writedown of part of the recent acquisitions). You can be sure that opponents will work in the other direction, with money too, even in the EU where officials are not allowed to receive payments so openly. The battle has to be won in the US, before it can stick in other jurisdictions.